One of the pleasures of movie watching is the suspension of disbelief. Yet while you can be fully absorbed in a movie, unless you’re a child or certifiable, you never actually put aside your belief in the real world — you just happily agree to go along with the fictional flow. Some directors never spin their lies successfully enough for this to happen, while others blow it with anachronisms, miscasting, shoddy filmmaking, dumb choices or merely a solitary false note. Other movies lose you, only to reel you back in tentatively with a jolt of intelligence or an image that sticks.

Such is “Dead Man Down,” a thriller that piles on its absurdities so fast and with such apparent obliviousness that you hope (pray) you’ll soon be watching either a diverting art-film intervention, like Werner Herzog’s remake of “Bad Lieutenant,” or joy riding with one of those rarest of screen delights: the demented howler. “Dead Man Down,” unfortunately, turns out to be too innocuous to qualify as either actually good or delectably bad. Yet while Colin Farrell and his sensitive, hardworking eyebrows help keep it from becoming a full-bore lampoon, the gangland clichés, nutty plot and seemingly random casting choices (F. Murray Abraham, Armand Assante, Isabelle Huppert) stoke your hopes that true movie madness may rise out of the darkening shadows and pessimism.

Mr. Farrell plays Victor, a thug with a secret past and skills who works for Alphonse (Terrence Howard), a New York drug dealer. Someone has been threatening Alphonse, and it’s getting to him. His initial solution involves gunning down an apartment filled with Jamaican drug dealers, part of a United Nations underworld that has turned New York into the Wild West (or a Luc Besson cartoon) teeming with bald Albanian gangsters and heavily armed Hungarians. The Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, who played the glowering lead in the original screen versions of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy, here plays Beatrice, a beautician with a disfigured face. Ms. Huppert plays Beatrice’s near-deaf mother; the British actor Dominic Cooper plays, appealingly, Victor’s friend.

Victor and Beatrice meet when she waves at him from the apartment tower across from his while, in a nice humanizing touch, he vacuums his pad. After some filler they go out on a date that swerves from ho-hum to hilarious when she whips out her cell and plays a video of Victor choking someone to death in front of his window, a twist that makes him seem pretty dumb for an ostensibly brilliant guy and reminds you of how great “Rear Window” truly is. If Victor refuses to kill the man who disfigured her, she snarls, tapping her inner Ann Savage for a few memorable moments (Savage was a star of the desperate noir classic “Detour”), she will go to the coppers.

Beatrice doesn’t say coppers, which is too bad, because the movie might have been better if its Danish director, Niels Arden Oplev, had played with the genre clichés stuffed in this turkey instead of going for straight-up action. There’s talent in “Dead Man Down” — you laugh, but you also keep watching — even if it’s unclear whether J. H. Wyman wrote the script with his tongue wedged deep in his cheek, or if Mr. Oplev inadvertently pushed the movie to the brink of comedy. (Mr. Wyman’s credits include the science-fiction series “Fringe”; Mr. Oplev directed the first “Dragon Tattoo” movie.)

Then again, by the time the Hungarian engineer drives his truck into a mansion and springs from the wreckage with gun blazing, the question of whether all this was intentionally ridiculous is moot.